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Friday, 15 October 2010

Catching Up - Part 1

Maybe a good first post for this blog would be to fill in the gap between my last post on Tumblr and today. I could attempt to condense the last 3 months into a paragraph, but will bore you, I mean entertain you, instead with the finer details.

It seems like ages ago that I was busy planning a filming session and getting crew and cast lined up for a 3minute short. Well, here is the short story: it never happened. The long story? A lot did happen and we did go ahead with filming, just not as planned.

The 'Tell It Your Way' competition (by Phillips TV and RSA) had been announced in April. I only came across it early July and ambitiously thought it could be done in time for the August 8th deadline. The truth is, as much as we had a script and a shot list ready to go, that's all we had. July is a busy month and we ended up not being able to get the desired cast or even a good editor at such short notice.

Taro was still willing to direct and I would produce, but in the circumstances I ended up doubling as the main (and thankfully only) character. Filming turned out to be tricky as the weather was against us, and, uhm, small detail, we didn't quite plan the childcare properly and ended up with 2 kids on location on our 1st day filming. The joys of parenthood.

On day 2 of filming we had fake blood! Yay. It was a sticky business as I prepared it at home with lots of glucose and chocolate syrup. Not having got the proper filming permits or contacted local police about our intentions, we had to make sure to film the bloody scene quickly and get it cleaned up before attracting any attention from either passers-by or wasps.

The plus side was that we got to shoot it all with our new DSLR - Canon 550D. I still have to learn how to use it properly to make the most of its features, but the picture quality is great!

With all the material at hand we loaded it into Final Cut Pro and Taro started to edit. We now had a week to go and the rough cut wasn't looking great. With some work, possibly a good grade and an audio session it would look better, but would it make any more sense?

We could finish it, upload it and enter it to the competition but we would then have our names (and face) on something that was below the standard that we set out to achieve; or we could agree that it was a fun experience that we learnt a lot from, but would call it a day and save ourselves from public ridicule. OK, maybe it wasn't that bad.

The deadline came and went and eventually two winners were announced. Seeing those finished shorts made me happy with our decision to quit. The overall winning short is fantastic.